By the time you read this column the presidency of Barack Obama will be ticking down to its last 48 hours.
For some this is cause for celebration. I’m among the mourners.
Let the historians decide where Obama ranks among America’s presidents (I think he’s going to look better and better with the passage of time). One thing I feel confident saying about him right now is that he is a good man.
In this regard it is impossible not to compare him to the man who is about to replace him. Consider the amazing thinness of Donald Trump’s skin. Most public figures accept that criticism and blame come with the territory. “If you can’t take the heat,” President Truman famously said, “get out of the kitchen.”
Time and again our president-elect has shown himself to be entirely heat-intolerant. But instead of getting out of the kitchen, he gets out a flamethrower and returns fire.
Forget the old-fashioned notion of being above the fray. When this guy feels attacked, he goes schoolyard. Boiled down, his tweets amount to, “Oh yeah? Well you’re a great, big stupid head.”
For a guy whose hair, from the back, resembles a duck’s back, he sure doesn’t let any water roll off.
But we have four years to gaze upon the presidency — and hair — of Donald Trump. We have but a couple of days to consider the presidency of Barack Obama. Plenty of people are weighing in, naturally. For a good compare-and-contrast there’s Charles Blow’s column in The New York Times and Cornel West’s column in the Guardian. Two African-American writers with opposing takes. Here are highlights from each.
Blow: “Whether you agree with individual decisions or the content of his rhetoric, it is impossible to argue that he did not conduct himself with dignity and respect and that he did not lead the country with those values as a guiding light.”
West (who is speaking at Penn State this Friday night): “Obama’s lack of courage to confront Wall Street criminals and his lapse of character in ordering drone strikes unintentionally led to rightwing populist revolts at home and ugly Islamic fascist rebellions in the Middle East. And as deporter-in-chief – nearly 2.5 million immigrants were deported under his watch – Obama policies prefigure Trump’s barbaric plans.”
I agree with both writers. I wish Obama hadn’t done the things West chides him for. I also wish he had done more or different in certain areas: more on climate change, more on Syria, more on income inequality, more on police racial profiling.
To this day I don’t understand why, when he first took office, he pushed for healthcare reform, as urgently as that was needed, rather than for a massive jobs program, which we needed even more.
If Trump is never above the fray, I was continually frustrated with Obama for being too much above the fray – for not defending himself whenever his opponents tried to fool the public into believing that our economic doldrums and the messes in Afghanistan and Iraq were his fault, rather than his predecessor’s.
I sometimes felt like he was dealt a bad hand, then played it badly.
That said, like Blow, I admire the departing president enormously. He is everything that Donald Trump is not: thoughtful, well-read, gracious, charming, eloquent. In an era when political sex scandals have become so numbingly commonplace that not even Trump’s groping video could sink his candidacy, Obama, as far as we know, has been a paragon of virtue.
I was skeptical when he ran in 2008. When he said, “Yes, we can,” I wanted him to finish the sentence: “Yes, we can what?” He sounded like a progressive but governed as a centrist and some of us never got over the disappointment of those expectations.
Still: I watched his 2008 victory speech the other night. Seeing African-Americans around the country react to the news that, in this land with its 400-year history of racism, one of their own was about to become president, was one of the most moving public moments of my lifetime, maybe in all of American history.
I saw “Fences” a few days ago, a beautiful piece of writing from start to finish. There’s a moment in the film when Denzel Washington’s character, a former Negro Leagues player, belittles Jackie Robinson’s talent. But Robinson didn’t become Major League Baseball’s first black player because he was the Negro Leagues’ best player.
As Jimmy Breslin puts it in his book about Branch Rickey, the baseball executive who brought Robinson to the big leagues, “Robinson could control a bat and hit behind the runner. But could he control himself under insults and even assaults and put the attackers to shame?”
Rickey thought he could, and he was right. Sixty years later, Obama faced a lot of the same ugliness and like Jackie Robinson, he kept his cool.
Whereas Trump has no cool to keep. That is a quality a lot of us are going to miss terribly.
